Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is one of most common cancer with gradually increasing incidence and high mortality. chromogenic RCC (chRCC) is the third most common histological subtype of RCC, accounting for about 5-7% of RCC. In our study, the transcriptome expression profile data (n=89) of chRCC, corresponding clinical data (n=113) and the somatic mutation data (n=66) was obtained from the TCGA database. We first analyzed the mutation data of chRCC patients and divided chRCC patients into high and low tumor mutation burden (TMB) groups based on the median TMB. We found that high TMB was significantly associated with worse prognosis and could promote tumor metastasis and development. Moreover, four different immune-related genes (BIRC5, PDGFRL, INHBE, IL20RB) were also identified. We found that BIRC5 was significantly overexpressed in the high TMB group and correlated with worse prognosis. The result of univariate and multivariate COX analysis demonstrated that BIRC5 (HR=2.094) may serve as a prognostic indicator for patients with chRCC with high TMB. In addition, we identified the possible functional pathways of BIRC5 through GSEA enrichment. A positive correlation was obtained between BIRC5 and the abundance of CD4 + T cells. The result of our study revealed their correlation between the immune-related genes and clinicopathologic features as well as potential functional pathways as well as immune infiltrating cells, which may provide more data about the development of chRCC immunotherapy.
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